49 Years Ago, Harry Belafonte Hosted the Tonight Show—and It Was Amazing

He interviewed RFK and MLK months before their deaths. Fifteen of 25 guests were African American.

February 16, 2017

Ready to fight back?

Sign up for Take Action Now and we’ll send you three meaningful actions every Tuesday.

Thank you for signing up. For more from The Nation, check out our latest issue.

Subscribe now for as little as $2 a month!

Support Progressive Journalism

The Nation is reader supported: Chip in $10 or more to help us continue to write about the issues that matter.

Fight Back!

Sign up for Take Action Now and we’ll send you three meaningful actions you can each week.

Travel With The Nation

Be the first to hear about Nation Travels destinations, and explore the world with kindred spirits.

Sign up for our Wine Club today.

Did you know you can support The Nation by drinking wine?

Television made Donald Trump president. The master of The Apprentice created a character named “Donald Trump”—a tough but fair business genius—and sold him to the country. That character, so different from the man who declared six business bankruptcies and stiffed his contractors, then grabbed the microphone to opine about politics. As he spouted nonsense about President Obama’s birth certificate, television fell for him again, featuring him on cable shows well after his claim had been proven an early case of fake news. And this addiction continued throughout Trump’s long-shot presidential campaign, as he spewed hate—and pumped up network ratings. CBS’s Leslie Moonves will go down in history for admitting that “It may not be good for America, but it’s damn good for CBS…. The money’s rolling in.” He continued: “It’s a terrible thing to say, but bring it on, Donald. Go ahead. Keep going.”1

When the old folks say television used to be different from the profit-driven, ratings-obsessed, news-as-entertainment industry of today, they don’t always have good counterexamples. But a few years back, I came across a perfect one: the week in February 1968 when, at the height of the Vietnam War’s Tet offensive, as riots were wracking major American cities and the Democratic Party was coming apart, Johnny Carson handed The Tonight Show over to the legendary Harry Belafonte, who proceeded to use the platform to introduce white America to his world of art and activism.2

The week featured Belafonte’s searing, in-depth interviews with Robert F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr., just months before both were assassinated. Even before their deaths, America had begun to unravel. Big, bold changes like the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts still left black Americans behind economically, while whites were convinced they’d done enough. The most innovative efforts in the War on Poverty were already winding down, a casualty of white backlash and ballooning spending on the Vietnam War. Richard Nixon loomed ominously on the horizon. In conversation with Belafonte, King and Kennedy come across as thoughtful, admirable, heroic—but also battered and shaken. They don’t have the answers.3

But the show wasn’t all politics. The well-connected entertainer gave his audience an amazing high-low pop-culture-and-politics mix. The night Kennedy appeared, so did Bill Cosby, Lena Horne, and the Greek actress Melina Mercouri. A few days later, King kibitzed with comedian Nipsey Russell, the blacklisted African-American singer Leon Bibb, and actor Paul Newman, who played his trombone. Another episode featured basketball star Wilt Chamberlain and actor Zero Mostel, who stood on the couch to shake the giant NBA player’s hand. Other guests included singers Buffy Sainte-Marie, Petula Clark, Dionne Warwick, and Robert Goulet; comedians Tom and Dick Smothers; actor Sidney Poitier (Belafonte’s close friend); American poet laureate Marianne Moore; water-skier Ken White; and Metropolitan Museum of Art director Thomas Hoving. Fifteen of the 25 guests that week were African-American. Only Belafonte could have pulled that off, says TV producer Norman Lear almost 50 years later. “He was an ambassador in both directions—to his own people and to the Caucasian community. There wasn’t anyone else like him. It is rare to this day.”4

3

4

5

Belafonte’s Tonight Show stint certainly thrilled black viewers everywhere. The scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. recalls being a high-school junior in Piedmont, West Virginia, transfixed by seeing the entertainer on Carson’s throne. “Night after night, my father and I stayed up late to watch a black man host the highest-rated show in its time slot—history in the making,” Gates wrote in a 1996 New Yorker profile of Belafonte.5

But for many Americans, that breakthrough week is lost history. I only found out about it myself four years ago when I read Belafonte’s beautiful memoir, My Song. As I learned more about that week, I felt as if I’d opened a magical wardrobe into a world where black and white people met as equals and enjoyed one another, for a few hours, anyway. It was like seeing a luminous parallel America where everything seemed possible, even if it wasn’t in the end. I became obsessed with writing about it; I made lists of people I wanted to interview (some of whom, like the late Julian Bond, I missed). Meanwhile, a presidential race emerged in which a farcical, racist TV star became the Republican front-runner and then got elected president. I became distracted from the Tonight Show story by the election, and demoralized by the political and media culture in which it took place.6

“He was an ambassador in both directions. There wasn’t anyone else like him.” —Norman Lear

It’s a mood that Belafonte himself might share. As he told TheNew York Times on the eve of the election, “I’ve never known this country to be so racist as it is at this moment. It’s amazing, after all that we’ve been through.” Still, as the legend celebrates his 90th birthday on March 1, now might be as good a time as any to retrieve a different past. Almost 50 years ago, with the country headed into an election as epochal and as disappointing as the one we just endured, with the world at least as broken as it is now, something wonderful and unexpected happened nonetheless.7

In the fall of 2013, I approached Belafonte at an event commemorating the 50th anniversary of the March on Washington to ask him more about his week as a Tonight Show host. The evening’s program rightly placed him in the firmament of the civil-rights movement, next to King’s lawyer Clarence Jones; a still-vibrant Julian Bond; and the siblings of James Chaney, Andrew Goodman, and Michael Schwerner, the activists killed during Mississippi’s 1964 Freedom Summer. After those murders, Belafonte and his friend Sidney Poitier flew undercover to Mississippi with $70,000 stuffed in a black doctor’s bag to fund the movement into the fall. Chased by armed Klansmen while leaving the Greenwood airport, they almost didn’t make it out of the South alive. He and Poitier would later joke about the adventure when they met on air. “Don’t ever call me again,” Poitier quipped.8

Gracious and kind, Belafonte seemed warmed by my curiosity about the long-lost Tonight Show week. It almost hadn’t happened, he recalled, since he’d turned down Carson’s first offer to sub for him. Despite his many successes, Belafonte had had some bad TV experiences in the years leading up to the invitation. He was the first African American to win an Emmy Award, for a 1959 CBS special, Tonight With Belafonte, which led to a contract for a multi-episode prime-time show. The first and only episode featured talented entertainers, black and white, singing and dancing together, but CBS quickly told the star to choose either an all-black or all-white cast, because the sponsor, Revlon, had gotten complaints about race-mixing. Belafonte refused, and though he was paid in full, the series was canceled.9

But that wasn’t the reason he’d initially turned Carson down, Belafonte told me. “I felt totally inadequate to fill that chair. Johnny brought a Nebraska sense of the American mosaic that was unique to that slot and that time. I told him, ‘I can’t do what you do.’” But then the legendary Robert Sarnoff, head of NBC’s parent company RCA, personally lobbied him, promising him control of the guest list and pitching it as an important step for race relations. Belafonte accepted.10

It’s hard to imagine this superstar feeling “inadequate,” but Belafonte has always had a shyness about him. His gentleness made him a good host, as he asked his guests about their feelings (and not just thoughts) about the troubles of the time. At least that’s the case in the interviews we can still see today. Of the Tonight Show episodes in an archive assembled by Carson Entertainment, only two of the interviews from Belafonte’s week survived. Through 1971, in order to save money, NBC taped over old episodes to film new ones. Either by coincidence or the intervention of persons unknown, the only interviews that remain are Belafonte’s half-hour talks with Kennedy and King.11

“It was the most fun we ever had!” Chiz Schultz tells me on the phone. An executive producer at Belafonte Entertainment, Schultz worked on that historic Tonight Show week. Belafonte had negotiated a good deal: He’d sing a song in place of Carson’s droll monologue, and he wouldn’t pitch products or do commercial lead-ins like Carson did; that would be the job of sidekick Ed McMahon. He would also have total control of the guest list, though he agreed to show it to NBC higher-ups.12

Shortly after Belafonte turned in his list, “we got a visit from an NBC VP,” Schultz recalls. “He said, ‘That’s great—you’re having Dr. King. But he’s not gonna get into that civil-rights stuff, is he?’ Harry just deadpanned, ‘No, he’s going to talk about opera.’ That was really the end of it—Harry solved it with a joke, right there in the office.”13

The singer and activist Buffy Sainte-Marie, who’d lost television engagements over her antiwar and pro-American-Indian activism, had previously been told by network shows, including Carson’s, that she couldn’t sing her protest songs. “Harry said, ‘Sing whatever you want,’” Sainte-Marie told me via e-mail, “and I sang ‘Now That the Buffalo’s Gone,’” which she says awakened people to the fact that “politicians and contractors are making a killing abusing Native American constitutional rights.” The Smothers Brothers were also controversial; CBS regularly censored, and eventually canceled, their variety show for its forays into liberal politics. But with Belafonte, Tommy Smothers joked: “I want to thank CBS for allowing us to come on NBC and do some of our distasteful material.”14

“The views that I represent, I don’t think are supported by anything other than a minority of people.” —Robert F. Kennedy

“All of these people came with a social point of view,” Belafonte recalled. “That was my goal: to articulate a particular point of view. We were at the peak of social and political struggle in the country. America was awakened. The viewership was astounding.”15

And astounded. His weeklong stint offered a panoramic view of a fractured America groping toward wholeness, featuring celebrity guests who were all, in their way, working to close the divides of race and class. But the affable Belafonte also bantered with McMahon and showed home videos of his family on vacation. A Newsweek feature profiling the wild week, “Belafonte Power,” seemed bewildered by the juxtaposition of family fun and politics:16

One minute, he [Belafonte] would reminisce with Poitier about that time in Mississippi when the KKK chased them 10 miles into the next county. The next, he would show home movies of his wife (who is white) and children watching him and white companions water ski in Las Vegas. “In America, it’s very obvious that we are racially torn far apart,” he explains. “Now, I could go on the air and hack away and make the point every minute, politically. But this week people saw me with a bunch of guys flopping around in the water and relating to one another on a very friendly level.”17

But amid the chitchat, comedy, and song, the conversation often turned dramatic, radical, and unfamiliar (a transcript of Kennedy’s interview shows the bewildered transcriber recording a reference to “black nationalists” as “black math students”). Given the times, how could it have been any other way? The week before the show, as chronicled by Taylor Branch in At Canaan’s Edge, King was wrangling with his closest allies, who opposed his plans for a massive Poor People’s Campaign in Washington that would feature nonviolent direct action, complete with a “shantytown” occupation. Bayard Rustin, the pacifist and socialist who’d planned the 1963 March on Washington, mocked the scheme, warning King that it “can only lead to further backlash and repression,” and telling him to drop the “mystical bullshit.”18

The night before Belafonte’s week started, King preached his famous “Drum Major Instinct” sermon, a meditation on ambition, approbation, and social change. He then went to Chicago to meet with 30 mothers convened by the increasingly militant National Welfare Rights Organization, whose leader, George Wiley, had expressly designed an agenda to put the screws to King and ensure that the NWRO would be central to the Poor People’s Campaign. Viewing King as out of touch, the women “jumped on Martin like no one ever had before,” aide Andrew Young would recall later. The mothers won King’s pledge to join their fight, a subject he would discuss with Belafonte a few nights later.19

King headed next to a Washington meeting of the venerable Clergy and Laity Concerned About Vietnam to pitch the Poor People’s Campaign to them. “When I say ‘poor people,’ I am not only talking about black people,” he told the group; King planned to organize a multiracial movement of the dispossessed. This would get him in trouble with Black Power advocate Stokely Carmichael in his very next meeting. Carmichael backed the effort to target poverty, but criticized its “serious tactical error” in missing “a correct move toward black solidarity.” King convinced Carmichael to stay neutral on the march, but he couldn’t get him to avoid attacking its multiracial reach or overall thrust of nonviolence.20

The next day, King evangelized about poverty to the Washington Chamber of Commerce, and stayed so long that he was late for his Tonight Show appearance. A few days later, sanitation workers in Memphis authorized the strike that would eventually draw King to the city where he’d be assassinated in less than two months.21

If the King who showed up for The Tonight Show was exhausted, beset by attacks from allies in his own movement, the Bobby Kennedy who kicked off Belafonte’s first night likewise seemed tired and shaken by events. Just a few days earlier, he’d told reporters that he would not run for president. (Six weeks later, he would change his mind.) This is not a glib or confident Kennedy we see in conversation. He’s a man agonized about the fate of the country, someone who struggles for the words to describe what disturbs him. At times, it’s painful to watch. He talks several times about the plague of rats in urban slums, as though he hopes that might make vivid for the predominantly white audience the suffering they don’t see.22

Mostly, Kennedy bears witness: “I visited an Indian reservation; the greatest source of death among teenagers is suicide,” he tells Belafonte. “I’ve seen children who are starving to death in the United States. Not ‘I read about children who are starving to death.’ I’ve seen children who are starving to death…. We have 70 million television sets…but we have a third of our children living at or under the poverty level in this country.”23

You realize watching Kennedy how quickly the activist Great Society period in our history came to a close. Yes, its important large programs would remain—Medicare, Head Start, Title I education funding—but the smaller, visionary, urgent projects that grappled with systemic poverty, racism, and youth despair were already winding down. Tampa, Buffalo, Minneapolis, Newark, Detroit, Milwaukee, and Washington had all exploded in riots just the year before, and by February 1968, the Vietnam War was forcing Johnson to curtail domestic spending.24

“People believe these programs are continuing,” Kennedy says indignantly, yet Health, Education, and Welfare Secretary John Gardner had announced earlier that week that there’d be 70,000 fewer summer youth jobs than the year before. “And considering the problems we had then because people didn’t—partially, at least—because people didn’t have jobs, didn’t have employment, didn’t have places to go…” Kennedy trails off.25

This is a radical Kennedy, railing against the cigarette industry for killing 350,000 Americans, though that industry was a major Tonight Show sponsor. He jousts with Belafonte when the host suggests that Americans engaged in social change present “the best image” of the country to the world: “Well, not only our best ‘image’—that’s a Madison Avenue word. That is the United States, in my opinion.”26

Belafonte parries: “Then why the great disillusionment?” Kennedy’s long, sometimes rambling answer touches on the Cold War, drug policy, and atomic weapons, but it is above all a blistering indictment of American hypocrisy, with a dollop of Kennedy optimism:27

So there is this great wealth that I have talked about, and yet there is great poverty. There are speeches made about the fact that we’re going to treat people equally, yet we don’t treat everybody equally. If we weren’t so sanctimonious about it, if we weren’t hypocritical about it, if we didn’t tell untruths about ourselves and faced up to reality, then I think our country would be better off and our people would have much more confidence in those of us who are public officials and in our government as a whole.28

Kennedy refuses to bite when asked whether the country will have “a real choice” in November. He sounds fatalistic about ending the war in Vietnam and defeating Johnson. “Being frank about it, I think it’s going to be very difficult,” he says. “The views that I represent, I don’t think are supported by anything other than a minority of people in the United States.” He pauses, then laughs. “Can we end on a happier note? Can we do a commercial or something?”29

“I’m more concerned about the quality of my life than the quantity of my life.” —Martin Luther King

A soothing McMahon jumps in. “We’ll do a commercial. Why not escape this weekend for a weekend away at a Holiday Inn?” A black-and-white ad with a jingling soundtrack follows, inviting us to leave behind the troubles of poverty and war, “and pay for everything with your Gulf Travel Card!” Thus the painful interview ends in dystopic satire. Belafonte and Kennedy return and exchange pleasantries, and then the host bids a warm good night to his haunted guest.30

Belafonte’s interview with King is similarly edged with gloom. He playfully asks his friend, “So what do you have in store for us this summer?” King answers, “That’s a good question. I don’t know about the summer. I guess I should begin with what we have in store for this spring.” Of course, King would not live to see the summer; he was assassinated on April 4.31

King goes on to describe the reasons behind the Poor People’s Campaign. “The economic problem is probably the most serious problem confronting the Negro community,” he says to Belafonte, who’d already pledged his support. “I don’t want to be narrow about this and talk about only the black poor in our country. I must be concerned about Puerto Ricans that are poor, Mexican Americans, American Indians, and Appalachian whites. We are confronting a major depression in the poor community. The time has come to bring to bear the nonviolent direct-action movement to economic conditions we face in the country.”32

The interview comes alive when Belafonte quietly asks, “Dr. King, do you fear for your life?” King’s answer foreshadows the famous speech about mortality that he delivered the night before he was assassinated:33

Not really. We have lived with this a number of years now. If I moved around concerned about this, it would completely immobilize me and I couldn’t function. And so I’ve come to the point where I take this whole matter philosophically. I believe in my soul that unmerited suffering is redemptive, and if something happened to me, maybe something else would come of it. The other thing is that now, with what is ahead and what I have to do, I’m more concerned about the quality of my life than the quantity of my life. In other words, I’m more concerned about doing a good job and serving God. Ultimately, it isn’t so important how long you live—it’s how well you live.34

The crowd erupts in loud applause. Watching this moment nearly 50 years later, the reaction strikes me as strange. What exactly are they applauding? The audience’s noisy approval reminds me of the aftermath to the 2015 Charleston massacre, when white America thrilled to stories about the victims’ families “forgiving” the white-supremacist killer, Dylann Roof. We white people are just a little too grateful for saintly black people who are willing to die and to forgive their murderers. Maybe it was time, even back in 1968, to stop applauding their generosity of spirit and start preventing their killing.35

The ratings for Belafonte’s week were phenomenal: In New York, at least, they were higher than Carson’s usual numbers. But the Newsweek feature hinted at trouble: “The topic that hung heaviest all week was Vietnam. At every chance, Belafonte leaked his strong opposition.” And there were plenty of complaints, Belafonte told me. “Some people thought the week had been ideologically slanted, that it hadn’t been a level playing field. But for the other 51 weeks a year, it was very different.” In his memoir, Belafonte recalls saying goodbye to the Tonight Show audience this way: “I am fully aware of how many of you have been offended by the politics aired on this show this week. None of it was meant to offend. But all of this was consciously arranged by me to give you all a taste of what’s being said in rooms that many of you may not know or enter. Thank you for listening.”36

“We were at the peak of social and political struggle in the country. America was awakened.” —Harry Belafonte

Even today, I’m struck by Belafonte’s generosity in inviting Carson’s white audience to enter those rooms and hear those voices. According to Norman Lear, the week was a televised version of the kinds of parties and convenings that Belafonte regularly sponsored in his own home and in others’. “He brought together evenings of whites and blacks that would otherwise not exist anywhere,” Lear recalls. “All these years later, I still don’t see it that much.”37

If much of white America rebuffed Belafonte’s invitation, his black audience was changed by his turn as Tonight Show host. “It made us feel so proud, so significant,” says Bobby Rivers, an actor and critic who has hosted shows on VH1 and the Food Network. Rivers, who grew up in South Central Los Angeles near Watts during the riots, recalls: “I was a kid in school, but I was allowed to stay up late to see Dr. King’s appearance…. And I chose broadcast as a career because of it, determined to do the kind of TV work that black people were not seen doing in my youth.”38

Ready to Fight Back? Sign Up For Take Action Now

Today, watching King and Kennedy come alive in flickering black and white, conversing with the gentle but probing Belafonte, reminds us of our great loss. It hurts. Yet these intimate conversations just months before their awful murders show that they didn’t have all the answers. I’ve always felt that in 1968, we lost the heroes who would have led us into the new country we were struggling to become. Yet on The Tonight Show, they looked as lost as we are. We’d like to think that Kennedy would have reassembled the old New Deal coalition, bringing working-class whites back to a party they were already beginning to abandon, along with African Americans, Latinos, and young people. But Kennedy might have lost the nomination to Hubert Humphrey, given his tensions with labor. At any rate, he probably couldn’t have prevented the Democratic civil war at the nominating convention in Chicago later that year. King was struggling too, beset by old allies who thought he was moving too fast into the issues of Vietnam and poverty, and young leaders who thought he was going way too slow. I don’t know that he could have warned a younger generation away from the lure of nihilism, or reassured anxious white people that civil rights wasn’t a zero-sum game. This is not to minimize the tragedy of their assassinations. It is just to say the country was headed for a reckoning—with racism, with poverty, with the limits of America’s global role—and that King and Kennedy might not have been able to make any of that less painful.39

We still have Belafonte, who has devoted his later years to working with younger activists. “For a long time I said, ‘What has happened to the young?’” he told the Seattle news site Crosscut in October 2015. “What was all of that about, all my friends who were murdered: Bobby Kennedy, John F. Kennedy, Dr. King, etc., etc., etc.?” Then he went and found out for himself: They were helping to broker gang truces in the 1990s, or sitting in with Florida’s Dream Defenders to protest the killing of Trayvon Martin in 2013, or strategizing with young Baltimore leaders in the wake of Freddie Gray’s death at the hands of police in 2015. Belafonte also campaigned for Bernie Sanders in the Democratic primaries and served as honorary co-chair for the Women’s March on Washington. “Those of us who have lived almost a century have no right to cynicism,” he told Crosscut. “There is always something in motion…always people out there making a difference.”40

Joan WalshTwitterJoan Walsh, The Nation’s national-affairs correspondent, is the author of What’s the Matter With White People? Finding Our Way in the Next America.

Glad to see these clips get exposure. Startling to realize how short the 'good' years were, how harsh the clampdown--public assassinations, > lies from the top> never trusting the top again.
Important to be reminded we once had people speaking the truth without giving in to fear. It's in our DNA too even though a demagogue jumped at opportunity.
Unbelievable any of that week was taped over!

(0)(0)

Kevin Conwaysays:

March 2, 2017 at 7:25 pm

Victor's remark below hits the bullseye. First, it's not like Joan Walsh unearthed King Tut's tomb and it was the only one. Jack Paar preceded Johnny Carson. Paar had most of those people on, including Matin Luther King Jr. and both Kennedy's.

It's interesting that Walsh things she knows better than almost all Robert Kennedy aides, who have said he would have won the presidency. This is another indication underlying every thing she writes - drives her nuts that Sanders would have won. Without saying his name she has swiped at things he says, like "identity politics". Get over it Joan. Democrats took their eye off the ball while focusing on ceilings and resume's.

(3)(0)

Brian Cairnssays:

March 2, 2017 at 12:17 pm

Interesting that Walsh would write this piece after spending the entire primary season turning Harry into a white millenial.

(3)(1)

Seen From Heresays:

February 18, 2017 at 1:23 pm

What will motivate ongoing major press on the reality of vote suppression in the USA? This is the bigger story. Hearing MLK and RK speak again is heartbreaking. The basic right to vote is more important than Trump's swaggering bigotry...a fool who's ego creates media frenzied distractions from staggering losses of legal protections. Losing the right to vote is where we are losing the last vestiges of any real citizen's influence in government. What's keeping everyone from demanding more press coverage on this? If the media is addicted to profit driven emotional clicks this story can be made emotional and demand social pull if the real story is given its due. What's keeping the NYT's and other major press from paying their researchers to get on this? The apathetic drift in America is horrifying. Arguing this or that appointment is weak whining that's too late. Trump's "voter fraud" argument is another chest-thumping-distraction from the thousands to millions of blocked votes. Do USA citizens not get their voice will have and may have had NO IMPACT on the presidential election outcome? Where is the outcry from press and citizens alike?

(12)(1)

Walter Pewensays:

February 17, 2017 at 3:27 pm

Everybody should know: three anti-Walsh posts I made have been yanked within half a day. On Walsh's last column at the Nation, posts accusing me of not voting for Clinton (who I did in fact vote for) were magically gone as soon as I addressed them. Whoever is editing Walsh's column is not only breaking tradition with The Nation, they are behaving as cowardly slime. Possibly they are taking after their mentor.

(5)(8)

Walter Pewensays:

February 18, 2017 at 1:00 am

...And since this posting they have been restored.

(3)(6)

Victor Sciamarellisays:

February 17, 2017 at 6:55 am

I am cynical when it comes to Walsh. I think this is an example of someone using African-American history and experience, not to offer concrete support to African-Americans, but to further her own ends. This article is sympathetic and sentimental, but Walsh is without commitment to any real idea or program that would actually improve race relations and peoples economic lives.
In February 2016, Harry Belafonte endorsed Bernie Sanders for president and said Sanders represents “a moral imperative” and a “certain kind of truth that’s not often evidenced in the course of politics.” “He offers us a chance to declare unequivocally that there is a group of citizens who have a deep caring for where our nation goes and what it does in the process of going.”
Moreover, it was Walsh who exacerbated race relations, when during the early months of the primaries, she reminded everyone continuously that Sanders’ appeal was largely to a white audience.
And, to my memory, I don’t recalled a single article which critically examined Sanders’ economic ideas such as: universal health, his solid support for a $15 minimum wage, and free education, any one of which would dramatically improve the conditions of all working class Americans, especially African-Americans.
Walsh wants us to think she is on the same bus with Dr. King and Harry Belafonte, but I don’t think so.

(14)(13)

Walter Pewensays:

February 17, 2017 at 4:53 pm

Joan is on the JOAN bus.

(3)(6)

Karin Eckvallsays:

February 17, 2017 at 11:59 am

Good points, though I think Walsh was actually working to convince us that only white males supported Sanders. That was a Clinton campaign strategy, cooked up by Tom Perez, according to Podesta emails.

(11)(3)

Fred Carusosays:

February 17, 2017 at 4:10 am

Sure lots of phantom voting trolls, but not posting

(0)(3)

Patrick Mullaghysays:

February 17, 2017 at 3:36 am

What makes the thought of RFK as president so intriguing is that he was so abrasive. He detested Jack’s friend Gore Vidal. He pissed off Tip O’Neill. JK Galbraith said he didn’t have Jack’s tolerant detachment about different political views: “You were either for the Kennedys or a leper.”
Also unlike Jack, he was a bit of an autocrat. In his autobiography, the philosopher AJ Ayer, a leftie despite his vast family wealth, tells how when he visited the States he gave a talk about his philosophical views to VIPs, and presumably mentioned his skepticism about religion. Ethel Kennedy was moved to engage him in an argument about the existence of God and Ayer says: “She began to get into difficulty and Bobby’s voice sounded from the back of the room: ‘Drop it, Ethel.’ And she did.”
Feels like he would have really shaken things up.

(2)(0)

Walter Pewensays:

February 17, 2017 at 11:39 am

Yeah, and he did not allow Jack to go near Sinatra's house in Palm Springs. Just common knowledge there now, I was a kid with a realtor grandmother who knew many comings and goings in the Springs. See what you can learn without doing a doctorate in it?

(0)(3)

Frank Doughertysays:

February 16, 2017 at 10:42 pm

This piece stirs up long dormant memories for this old guy. In 1960, I knew a fellow college classmate at Antioch College named Ed Schwerner. By late fall of 1964, I was a young 2nd Lieutenant on a five week TDY assignmentt to Keesler AFB in Biloxi, Ms. Tensions in Mississippi were so high, because of the freedom riders, that out-of-state cars were being targeted by shotgun wielding locals. I hung my air force uniforms in plain sight on both the rear seat windows of my car. It was years later that I learned that Michael Schwerner, Ed's younger brother, was one of those freedom riders.

(7)(0)

Fred Carusosays:

February 16, 2017 at 12:48 pm

Nice piece, Walsh. Maybe the best you've done in a long time.

NOTE: In the 1970s, the term "liberals" was used the way we use "moderates" were today. On each side of "liberals" was "radicals" (the left) and "conservatives" (the right.)

Oh yes, the good old days, when we had the same paradox of two wings of democratic leadership, one claiming to stand for social justice at home while performing a holocaust is Vietnam - deliberately instigated by Johnson - killing two million Vietnamese people for no good reason - to "take a stand" against the spread of Communism.

In 2016, we have 21st century form of "blackout" censorship by the MSM, discretely and quietly reducing the exposure of Sanders, until it was too late to help Sanders.

Here, today, we have the same divisions in the Democratic party. On one side, the corporate warmongers of the undemocratic wing of the Democratic Party , whose secret CIA-staged coups in Honduras and Ukraine (the latter with help of Ukrainian neo-Nazis.) and are still claiming every kind of "secret" excuse for having lost the Presidential election.

These Democrats today falsely claim to wave the banner of the 1960s "radicals," but these oligarch-warmongers got control of the party in the mid-eighties, developing the DLC oligarchy, and the super delegate system, by 2015 had control of the DNC, which basically made a travesty of the nominating process [for insurgent candidates] cherry picking their candidate [Clinton] long before the 2016 primary started and bullying the MSM on equal-time sharing for candidates, which became history.

The "hacking" brouhaha is all about saturating the media with "Russian hacking" to turn a blind eye to the evidence that the [un] Democratic Party operatives screwed Sanders over.

IOW, the "Russian interference" media saturation is a smokescreen to avoid the issue of party partiality [towards Clinton] until the proverbial email trail is cold.

For the warmongering wing of the Democratic party, it was a "perfect fit" for post-election challenges to Trump. Unfortunately, it has the price of raising world tensions with the "other" global nuclear power, and the danger of a showdown.

Today, on the other side of the still [un]Democratic party are people like Sander, Merkley, Warren, etc. who want to end the huge spending on arms and "security" - the infamous military industrial complex - and spend that money at home on the poor and middle class - as Rev Martin Luther King preached and propagated.

These people, following the Sanders Revolution are the true legacy of people in the early 1970s, like Belafonte, Robert Kennedy, Buffy-Sainte Marie and Smothers Brother.

(16)(22)

Walter Pewensays:

February 17, 2017 at 4:47 pm

And Joan Walsh and Hillary Clinton are on the other side of Lake Superior.....

(0)(3)

Fred Carusosays:

February 16, 2017 at 1:32 pm

Please catch Amy Goodman's interview today on DemocracyNow.org - with Glen Greenwald on the current situation, the irony of the establishment Democratic Party position, and the dangers of the ill-defined "deep state" and others.

(8)(12)

Fred Carusosays:

February 16, 2017 at 1:07 pm

Sorry, that's "Buffy Sainte-Marie"

(0)(0)

Karin Eckvallsays:

February 16, 2017 at 12:29 pm

Ms. Walsh, thank you for this interesting and informative and seemingly heartfelt article. Bobby Kennedy was someone I admired greatly, along with Dr. King, so I look forward to watching these interviews. However, some of your comments reflect a very skewed perspective about race.

You say, "big, bold changes like the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts still left black Americans behind economically, while whites were convinced they’d done enough." You would never dream of making such a generalization about "blacks" as though they are one entity; why do you feel entitled to speak of whites as though we all think and feel the same things. Also, you ignore the fact that many whites and other minorities were also left in poverty.

You quote Dr. King: "Ultimately, it isn’t so important how long you live—it’s how well you live". You express confusion about the applause this receives, and decide it's some twisted celebration by whites of black martyrs. But isn't that sentiment something that anyone who has ever attended church has heard from the pulpit, that this is the way we should live. Why turn it into something racial? And you again make a sweeping generalization about "white America", "thrilling" to aspects of the Dylan White case. Bizarre.

Also, I disagree that King and Kennedy didn't have answers about how to improve things. I think they felt overwhelmed by and sometimes hopeless about the task of persuading more Americans to their ideas.

I recently saw an old video myself, of Bill Clinton attacking undocumented immigrants as criminals and exploiters of social services, who contributed nothing to the country and needed to be stopped at the border or deported. Unlike King and Kennedy, whom you profess to admire, the Clintons willingly and routinely sold out the very people the other men fought and gave their lives for, and did so for personal gain - power and money. Your deep and unwavering devotion to the Clintons ultimately leaves much of what you say in this article in doubt.

I agree, but if Joan Walsh is changing her position, and wants to be a friend of the Revolution, we should look forward, not back, and cut a little slack. We need everyone we can get for the Revolution.

(2)(6)

Karin Eckvallsays:

February 16, 2017 at 4:41 pm

Don't get any sense that she's changing her position, but I guess we can always hope.

(3)(7)

Karin Eckvallsays:

February 17, 2017 at 12:12 pm

Walsh? When has she ever wavered from a devotion to the Clintons?

And btw, thanks so much for implying that I'm stupid. Your hostility overfloweth throughout The Nation's pages, and your abusive and foul language (as in, Walsh is a whore) is getting old fast. Maybe that's why you get the thumbs down and deleted comments that you're always bitching about.

(7)(1)

Walter Pewensays:

February 17, 2017 at 4:45 pm

Er, uh. I did not imply you were stupid.

(0)(3)

Walter Pewensays:

February 17, 2017 at 4:42 pm

I certainly called Walsh a whore today for the first time. Spade's a spade. Walsh cares about WALSH.

(0)(9)

Walter Pewensays:

February 17, 2017 at 4:41 pm

You do seem confused here. Who are you addressing, or did Walsh's groupies "arrange" your comment to appear so?

(0)(7)

Walter Pewensays:

February 18, 2017 at 6:52 pm

You would think, after enough time, trolling through this publication giving random thumbs down would be boring. It would certainly be like a weasel in the karmic play of things. Yet, it continues forever. Just an indicator of how mediorcrity seems to have a longer shelf life than quality. Lil' troll, even if you are one of us, you have a fucked quality of life. What nothingness. At a publication that is somethingness.....

(0)(6)

Karin Eckvallsays:

February 16, 2017 at 11:20 pm

Thumbs-downers: She is changing her opinion or she shouldn't change her opinion?

(0)(1)

Fred Carusosays:

February 16, 2017 at 8:58 pm

That's what I mean. This is the second article where she did not mention the establishment's pet peeve, the "Russian hacking" bullshit.